Three years have passed since I stood in a
tiny market in Sarajevo, notebook in hand, gazing through a chaos of smoke
and running feet at the scores of dead heaped about the blood-slick earth.
I tried but failed to count the corpses: the explosion of the mortar shell
had sent long sheets of the market's ramshackle metal roof slicing through
the boisterous crowd, instantly reducing what had been people to limbs and
torsos and bits of tissue. Already, burly men had begun piling scraps of
flesh and bone on these blackened sheets of steel, flinging them into the
bed of an ancient dump truck. Nearby, an enormous fellow in a black overcoat
wept bitterly over the twisted torso of a woman lying at his feet, while
two smaller men struggled to hold him back; imprisoned in the bear hug,
he turned his great head toward the sky, and as I watched the cords in his
neck tense and his mouth gape I realized that though my eyes were filled
with carnage and my nose with the stench of cordite my ears could hear nothing.
Following his stare I gazed upward and, just as the enormous, hate-filled
scream broke through my consciousness, I saw the silver planes tracing their
way elegantly through the bright blue sky: American F-16s-the fighter planes
of NATO, on patrol, guarding the besieged city of Sarajevo.

I had not meant to be at the market that sunny afternoon. I had planned
instead to revisit a favorite landmark. A dozen years earlier-before television
had made its streets as familiar to us as those of Saigon once had been-I
had traveled to Sarajevo and found myself standing beside the tiny bridge
where, seven decades before, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip had raised his
revolver, fired twice, and ushered in the modern world. Standing in his
footsteps-quite literally, for the Yugoslav government had seen fit, for
the benefit of posterity and the tourist industry, to sink impressions of
the soles of the young man's shoes into the concrete sidewalk-I closed my
eyes, blotted out the noise of the city around me, and tried to imagine
what it had felt like to change the course of history with two squeezes
of the finger.

Of course the young Bosnian Serb's intent in murdering the Austrian arch-duke
had been nowhere near so grandiose. That he succeeded in overturning historyon
such a scale proved only that the stability of that edifice had been greatly
exaggerated. And for many, that revelation-of the shallowness of what men
had come to call "modern civilization," soon to be proven in such bloody
fashion on the Great War's battlefields-brought with it a good deal of pathos.
On that sunny day in Sarajevo, eyes closed, I felt a wisp of that pathos,
as the memory of some fragmented bit of eloquence floated through my mind;
only after a good deal of searching did I findthe words I had not
quite been able to place: "The plunge of civilization into this abyss
of blood and darkness," Henry James had written to a friend in 1914, "is
a thing that so gives away the whole long age in which we have supposed
the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have
to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really
making for and meaning is too tragic for any words."

Eight years have now passed since our own annus mirabilis
of 1989: eight years since the Germans tore down with hammers and crowbars
the wall that had severed their country; eight years since the political
tide set forth in the streets of Berlin and Prague and Budapest began
its inexorable flow east, sweeping before it, two years later, the Soviet
Union itself. A four-decade military confrontation between the two most
heavily armed nations in history, each able to obliterate in a matter
of hours the surface of the planet, collapsed in dancing and celebration,
without the movement of a single tank or a sole infantryman, without a
shot fired or a drop of blood shed. After four decades of ominous black
skies, who could have imagined the Cold War would offer escape through
such a sunlit portal?

And yet have we truly managed to walk through that portal even now? What
have these eight years been "really making for and meaning"? For James's
words treated not only the agony of 1914 but the unforgiving character
of history itself: the "treacherous years" care little for the construction
put on them by men; they delight in their own grim ironies. And so at
its very creation the vaunted "post-Cold War world" would plunge into
its own "abyss of blood and darkness," gaping wide in peaceful Europe
itself, and at the precise place where Princip and his revolver christened
our century.

The wars in the former Yugoslavia-with their confusing narratives, their
end less complicated maps, their faceless diplomats
flying this way and that offering one more peace plan named for themselves-seem
today very far off. Yet it was scarcely two years ago that the scenes
from Europe, from modern Europe where the cars andthe roads and the
restaurants look muchlike our own, could be tuned in on any television
set: Gunners manning modern artillery pounding ancient cities into rubble.
Soldiers searching the ruins for survivors, raping the women and girls,
massacring the men; or herding them into concentration camps, there to
be abused, tortured, left to starve. We had seen nothing like it in Europe
since the Second World War-or so it was often said. It would be more accurate
to say simply that we had seen nothing like it. For, unlike the Second
World War, unlike the Great War over which James so bitterly grieved,
we no longer had to open the paper to follow the "plunge of civilization
into this abyss of blood and darkness"-we had only to press a small button
on the remote control and see. The gunners shelling, the children shrieking
on the operating table, the battered faces of emaciated men staring dully
out from behind barbed wire: we sat in our living rooms and watched all
of them as they enacted the drama before our eyes, clearly, undeniably,
day in and day out. And while we watched, 100,000 people died.

Who Is to Blame?

In the eschatology of the Cold War, the signs of the End of Time had always
been clear: the trumpets would sound, the Wall would be pulled down, Europe
would be whole and free. Now the beginning of the End of Time, so miraculously
achieved, had loosed a fountain of blood in Europe-and the West, the all-powerful
and triumphant West, could do no more than look on in horror and paralysis.
For however complicated the story of the demise of the former Yugoslavia,
history will likely prove itself relatively uninterested in the details
and focus instead on what was sorely lacking on the part of the West during
those years of war: the will to act. No doubt historians will find no
small irony in the fact that the Western countries, during these years
of impotent bickering, would blame their collective inertia on the need
to preserve consensus in the very institution that had borne them unscathed
through the "treacherous years" of the Cold War: the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization.

NATO had, of course, been created in 1949 to bring together the nations
of North America and western Europe to oppose the Soviet Union; keeping
the peace in Yugoslavia had never been part of its brief. Still, the fiasco
in Bosnia could not help but severely tarnish the alliance's reputation.
Not only had the televised barbarity in Europe forever undermined any
claim NATO might have had to be protector of the "moral values" of the
West, but by late 1994 "the most successful military alliance in history"-torn
by conflicts and recriminations of a bitterness not seen since the Suez
crisis of 1956-had come near to splitting apart. If Clinton administration
officials were finally moved to take strong action in Bosnia, they did
so in part because they had at last been forced to acknowledge that the
war was no longer simply about an obscure country with little strategic
value but was now also about the powerlessness of the West and the feebleness
of its institutions, NATO first among them.

Whatever the future of the Dayton Accords, the wars in Yugoslavia had
cast into strong relief an inevitable question: as the Cold War slipped
further and further into the past, what exactly was the purpose of the
Atlantic alliance? The Soviet Union had disappeared. And yet, even as
West Germany absorbed the former East Germany to become the incipient
economic powerhouse of the continent, several hundred thousand heavily
armed American troops stood at the heart of its reconstituted territory;
100,000 remain today, manning their tanks and armored personnel carriers,
guarding a border that no longer exists.

The "post-Cold War world" is a trope that has long since become a cliché,
and like many clichés it bears more scrutiny than it customarily receives.
For though it has not escaped notice that the United States now lacks
a "doctrine" to guide its foreign policy, the vaunted "containment" policy
having presumably been superseded, and though officials of the Clinton
administration have struggled to create memorable phrases to characterize
their presumably new approach to a presumably new world ("assertive multilateralism"
was put forward-alas-during the Bosnia fiasco; "enlargement of market
democracies" headed a more recent effort)-despite these rhetorical exercises,
in broad outline America's policy toward the world remains a good deal
more like that of the past four decades than different from it.

Preponderant Power

American national security planners remained determined to maintain "preponderant
power" in the world-the phrase first appeared in 1950 in the central Cold
War planning document known as NSC-68-and to do so by means of a grand
strategy that still depends on the forward basing of American troops:
100,000 in the heart of Europe; 100,000 in Asia, divided between Korea
and Japan; 25,000 in the Middle East; and a grand armada of 12 aircraftcarriers.

The purpose of these forces is clear, as Pentagon planners declared bluntly
in 1994: to "maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors
from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Although too
polite to say so, they clearly had in mind as the most important "potential
competitors" the Germans and the Japanese. In both countries, American
troops, the successors of the original Second World War occupation forces,
had traditionally served a "dual containment" role. While protecting Germany
and Japan from "outside aggression" the Americans prevented both countries
from rearming and thereby once again threatening their neighbors and undermining
the regional security systems constructed after the Second World War.

A half dozen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United
States shows no sign of abandoning the remnants of this containment policy.
On the contrary, American security officials have worked hard to "delink"
the need for U.S. troops from the Soviet menace, and have pushed to the
fore, among other supposed new threats, "rogue states" like North Korea,
Iran, and Iraq. American forces thus remain abroad to maintain a post-Cold
War hegemony independent of the defunct Soviet Union, and to support that
hegemony the United States spends roughly $260 billion a year on armaments
and troops-an amount that, though a good deal lower than the peaks of
the Reagan years, easily exceeds that of the ten next most heavily armed
nations combined. And henceforth American defense spending is almost certain
to rise.

For now the other shoe has dropped,the second major event to mark the
eight "treacherous years" since 1989: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
has announced its intention to march east. Last July, the leaders of the
16 alliance countries met in Madrid and invited Poland, Hungary and the
Czech Republic to join the very anti-Soviet organization that they
had once, as Warsaw Pact members, manned the front line in confronting.
Although the United States has never considered these nations vital to
its national interest, it will now undertake to guarantee their security
with its own armed forces, to regard an attack on them as an attack on
itself, and to repel such an attack with all its powers, including nuclear
weapons. And it will do so in the face of resentment and angry protests
from Russian leaders, who, until this decision, had shown themselves to
be extraordinarily cooperative in reaching a favorable and stable settlement
with the West.

Who would have predicted that the jubilation of 1989 would lead to this?
How can we begin to account for it? During her Senate confirmation hearings,
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared that Americans "must be
more than an audience, more even than actors; we must be the authors of
the history of our age." It was a dramatic statement of great ambition,
phrased in the kind of exceptionalist language that has been so familiar
in America's history-and oftentimes so damaging to a clear-eyed visionof
what America's true resources and vital interests actually are. Looking
at the cur-rent policies of America's leaders one suspects that, rather
than plunging ahead to embrace a new, post-Cold War world,they find themselves
marooned in the Cold War, pursuing an uncertain and empty hegemony, struggling
to expand and justifya predominance the United States already possesses.

II

On February 18, 1997, Madeleine Albright-self-proclaimed child of Munich,
refugee from Nazism and Stalinism, and now America's first female secretary
of state-leaned forward over the conference table of the North Atlantic
Council's Great Hall in Brussels, gazed at the 15 other foreign ministers
gathered about her, and proclaimed the new world. "We have chosen as our
common purpose to do for Europe's east what NATO did 50 years ago for
Europe's west," the Czech-born secretary declared, "to integrate new democracies,
eliminate old hatreds, provide confidence in economic recovery, and deter
conflict."

To "do for Europe's east what NATO did 50 years ago for Europe's west"?
For a stateswoman who lets pass no opportunity to underline her personal
connection to the great European tragedies of this century, the comparison
seemed stunningly inapt. A half-century ago, Germany found itself in a
state of utter devastation, its people clawing throughruins and brambles
in search of scraps of food; France and Britain were financially and spiritually
exhausted; and in the occupied states to the east, the soldiers of the
Red Army crouched menacingly, the spearhead of a nation that had arisen
triumphant from the war and saw before it now no power that could possibly
oppose it.

Compare this dark world to the eastern Europe of today. Poland, Hungary,
and the Czech Republic enjoy democratic politics, however tenuously, and
they are forcing their economies through various painful stages of transition
to free market systems. The Soviet Union has shattered into a congeries
of 15 separate states and the once-terrible Red Army has achieved a state
of almost complete disintegration: desertions, lack of money, and plummeting
morale have meant that, far from threatening Europe, Russia, as the world
saw demonstrated most horribly during the Chechnya war, can no longer
even invade itself.

If Albright's comparison seems foolish rhetoric, why then has the alliance
determined to move east, with all the political and financial expense
that that will entail? As with most such enormous government decisions,
the interests that brought this one about are many and diverse, and reach
back a number of years, to the half-decade before the collapse of the
Soviet Union. During those years, Presidents Reagan and Bush had worked
with President Gorbachev to push through a revolutionary series of arms
control agreements that together established a new and much more stable
security regime in central Europe. Among other things, the leaders agreed
to reduce dramatically troops, heavy battle tanks, and other "conventional"
weapons; to withdraw all intermediate-range nuclear missiles stationed
on European soil; and to reduce nuclear artillery shells and other battlefield
nuclear weapons.

These were historic agreements, andbecause they lessened traditional
Soviet advantages in Europe, particularly the Red Army's superiority in
troops and tanks, many of them were judged deeply favorable to the West.
Because they focused on the most dynamic and threatening weapons, the
agreements together helped put in place a new structure of security that
made a surprise attack of any sort in central Europe almost impossible.
Because of this "defense dominance"-the term is Michael Mandelbaum's,
from his book The Dawn of Peace in Europe-the leaders of either side would
need many months to prepare an actual attack, and thus the chance of war
breaking out was greatly reduced. As Mandelbaum points out, these agreements
formed the basic structure of a new, mutually verifiable means of promoting
stability and peace between what had been two hostile alliances.

Then came the revolutions of 1989. Gorbachev, who still had enormous military
force at his fingertips, might have reacted quite differently; other Soviet
leaders certainly would have. Instead, he chose to view the events in
eastern Europe as inevitable, and to work to ensure the peaceful disintegration
of what had been the outer wall of the Soviet empire. President Bush in
turn emphasized that further cooperation with the West would depend on
the Soviets' measured response to events in the east. At the same time,
Bush let the Soviets understand that in exchange for their cooperation
in letting "the process," such as it was, go forward peacefully, the West
would not take advantage of the uprisings to threaten Soviet borders-by,
say, inviting the newly free nations of the east to join NATO.

For its first tumultuous year, the Clinton administration held generally
to this policy. Soon, however, President Clinton began listening to the
passionate appeals of Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and other east European
leaders, who demanded with increasing desperation to be admitted into
the Western alliance. Not only had the Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and the
others suffered greatly during the titanic wars of this century, subsisting
under Nazi occupation during much of the Second World War and under Soviet
hegemony after it, they had always seen themselves as culturally and historically
part of the West: for many of the leading east European dissidents, "Europe"
had been their rallying call. But having succeeded in miraculously tearing
themselves from the Soviet grasp, the east European leaders were increasingly
perplexed by their cherished "Europe's" ambivalent attitudetoward them.

The expected ocean of financial aid had not arrived. Worse, the countries
of the West, rather than welcoming them into the European Union-the glittering
palace of capitalist trade and growth-had raised insuperable barriers
to their entry. If the true goals of Western policy in eastern Europe
were, as Secretary Albright maintained, "to integrate new democracies,
eliminate old hatreds, provide confidence in economic recovery, and deter
conflict," the best vehicle to achieve this was not NATO-which is, after
all, a military alliance-but the EU, whose reason for being was the promotion
of economic growth and stability through integration with western Europe.

The EU, however, was quietly moving in the other direction. The French,
fearing the prospect of a Germany dominating the continent, had been willing
to agree to German reunification only on condition that the Union's center
of gravity remain firmly anchored in the West; and the Maastricht Treaty
of 1991 had in effect enshrined this principle by establishing budgetary
and financial conditions for entry that the east European countries could
not possibly meet (and that would finish, ironically, by plunging much
of western Europe into recession). The west European leaders were above
all pragmatic; rather than force their farmers, say, to put their crops
in competition with much cheaper east European produce, they would satisfy
the east Europeans, via NATO, with an American nuclear guarantee.

Four years after the 1989 revolutions, the desperation of the Poles and
their eastern neighbors was growing. Not for the first time in their history,
"Europe" seemed todesire them much less than they desired it. If admission
into the European Union was an unrealistic dream, at least for the near
future, if NATO was all the "Europe" they might be offered, they would
gladly grasp it. In so doing, they hoped they were taking in hand not
only Madeleine Albright's bromides about promoting democracy and economic
stability but a Western guarantee against eventual Russian revanchism.

The "Security Vacuum"

In Washington, they had influential allies. By late 1993, Henry Kissinger
and Zbigniew Brzezinski, among others, had begun to criticize the Clinton
administration for allowing a "security vacuum" to emerge in eastern Europe.
Within the administration, key members of the bureaucracy began to stake
out positions. Senior military officers and civilian Pentagon officials
generally opposed expanding NATO, fearing that the result would be to
"dilute" the alliance and produce a kind of "NATO lite" in which guarantees
to the newly admitted countries would be less reliable than those to existing
members. Many in the State Department, including Strobe Talbott, then
the president's special envoy to Russia, argued that expanding NATO would
alienate the Russians with little compensating reward. Other senior officials,
notably Undersecretary of State Lynn Davis, began to push hard for granting
some sort of limited membership to the east European countries.

In the White House, meantime, President Clinton, who had been listening
to German chancellor Helmut Kohl worry about securing his newly united
country's eastern frontier, began to muse openly about the "security limbo"
in eastern Europe. Clinton's adviser on national security affairs, Anthony
Lake, had been conducting a number of discussions with Brzezinski, who
was strenuously promoting a "parallel track" strategy, which envisioned
admitting the eastern European countries to NATO while placating the Russians
with a separate diplomatic agreement. According to an extensive account
by Michael Dobbs in the Washington Post, it was Brzezinski who eventually
succeeded in convincing Lake to push this general approach.

Into this maelstrom of interests now intruded two events that embody the
odd contingency of history. First, Clinton nominated his old friend Strobe
Talbott to be deputy secretary of state, and Talbott found himself undergoing
bruising Senate hearings during which prominent Republicans accused him,
in effect, of being "soft" on Russia; the political implications for Clinton,
who would be facing voters in two years, were obvious. Second, Talbott
moved to bring Richard Holbrooke, then ambassador to Germany and an official
notorious for his aggressiveness and ambition, back to Washington to become
assistant secretary of state for European affairs. Holbrooke, as the Post's
Dobbs put it, "made clear that he regarded the reshaping of Europe's security
architecture as the modern-day equivalent of the 1919 Conference of Versailles,
and that he was in charge."

Holbrooke proceeded to push NATO expansion through the national security
bureaucracy with his customary vigor and vehemence. According to Dobbs,
when, at the first meeting of a key interagency group of military officers,
diplomats, and other officials who had been brought together to "study"
the question of expansion, Gen. Wesley Clark, an influential friendof
Bill Clinton (and now the NATO commander in Europe), observed mildly that
there remained "some issues we need to discuss," Holbrooke thundered back:"That
sounds like insubordination to me. We need to settle this right now. Either
you are on the president's program or you are not."

To Holbrooke's powerful advocacy were now added the pressures of the coming
presidential election: promoting NATO expansion would not only shelter
Bill Clinton from any Republican charge that he might be "soft on Russia,"
it would also help him in several key states of the Northeast and upper
Midwest that had large populations of Americans of east European descent.
During the campaign, Clinton would give only one foreign policy speech,
traveling to heavily ethnic Chicago to declare dramatically that "the
question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members, but when
and how."

"Us" versus "Them"

What the president notably did not say was why-why the United States,
eight years after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, six years after the
disintegration of the Soviet Union, had determined to extend its military
obligations to protect countries in eastern Europe that it had never viewed
as vital to its national security. On this question, the rhetoric coming
from the administration has been deeply confused, in part because different
audiences-Europeans, east and west; Russians; Americans-are being addressed,
and the messages required to placate them contradict one another.

To the American and European publics, for example-and in part to the Russians
as well-Clinton officials have offered what might be called the "one Europe"
rationale. As Secretary Albright put it in Moscow last May when she unveiled
the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation, and Security between
NATO and the Russian Federation, the alliance's decision to extend a formerly
hostile military alliance to the Russian border, far from threatening
Russia's security, instead would produce "an undivided, democratic, andfree
Europe" and "anchor Russia within a European system." "This NATO," the
secretary insisted, "is not directed against Russia." In this new world,
"it is not us versus them or them versus us. We are all on the same side."

How all these countries-some within the alliance, some outside of it-could
be "all on the same side" the secretary did not explain. As Henry Kissinger
put it, Clinton officials "keep talking about the absence of dividing
lines. With all due respect, this is nonsense. If you have an alliance,
you have a dividing line." President Clinton himself, before he saw the
light on expanding the alliance, warned darkly that to take such a step
would be to "draw a new line through Europe just a little further east."
Now, three years later, and against all logic, expanding the alliance
has come to mean creating a "Europe whole and free."

Of course, if one looks beyond the rhetoric of public relations, and the
eloquent appeals of east European leaders, and the strivings of ambitious
bureaucrats, and the transitory demands of U.S. election campaigns-if
one looks beyond all these, one finds that the plan to expand the alliance
is indeed motivated by an "us versus them" premise, and, at its heart,
by an exfoliating tree of assumptions about European history, Europe's
probable future, and the inevitable behavior of powerful states, which
is precisely why the Poles and the Czechs and the Hungarians have pleaded
so tenaciously to be admitted. "If this request is rejected," writes Kissinger,
"and the states bordering Germany are refused protection, Germany will
sooner or later seek to achieve its security by national efforts, encountering
on the way a Russia pursuing the same policy from its own side. A vacuum
between Germany and Russia threatens not only NATO cohesion but the very
existence of NATO as a meaningful institution. NATO cannot long survive
if the borders it protects are not threatened while it refuses to protect
the borders of adjoining countries that do feel threatened."

Beyond all the talk about an undivided Europe, it is this sort of reasoning
that one finds at the root of why the United States has now decided to
guarantee the security of eastern Europe. Such reasoning has a great ring
of authority but is fraught with contradictions. Like many "realist" arguments,
it pretends to set out timeless truths but instead is saturated with history.
It broods about the grim past and the morbid future while ignoring almost
entirely the possible present. It is not statesmanship. It is fatalism
posing as realism.

A statesman might have proposed a different path. He might have insisted
that the United States-by making use of its diplomatic weight-persuade
the Europeans to "protect" and "stabilize" the states of eastern Europe
by integrating them firmly into their economic system, of which Germany
forms the vigorous heart. He might have recognized that the security agreements
of the late 1980s and early 1990s had strongly bolstered the stability
of central Europe and seen that the key to preventing any so-called vacuum
between Germany and Russia is to avoid taking a fateful and unnecessary
military initiative sure to poison relations with the Russians at a time
when their domestic politics are delicate in the extreme, hanging on the
fragile health of one ailing man. He might have observed that the proposed
expansion might push the so-called vacuum east, by drawing a new line
gratuitously isolating Ukraine and the Baltics, in effect reducing them
to the role of Russia's new "buffer states"-buffer states with very considerable
ethnic Russian minorities that hold within them the true seeds of Russian
revanchism, and which may find themselves pressed into demanding that
NATO admit them, a move the Russians would be unable to countenance.

More broadly, the statesman might have asked himself whether the American
people-whose leaders have not bothered to consult them on the matter-are
committed to defending the countries of eastern Europe:whether Americans
are willing to send their young people to fight in Poland, or to launchtheir
nuclear weapons to defend it. And, if they are not, he might have wondered
what effect building such an empty guarantee into the alliance would eventually
have. He might have acknowledged that the United States should first of
all look after its own principal interests, and that those interests are
broader than so-called NATO cohesion for its own sake. They are a stable
and increasingly self-reliant Europe, with a prosperous and secure Germany
at its center, and an unthreatened and unthreatening Russia. Whatever
else it may do, it is not at all clear that rushing to absorb eastern
Europe into the Western alliance at this time will advance those interests.

The evidence thus far strongly suggests the contrary. Not only has the
unprecedented collaboration between Washington and Moscow come to an abrupt
halt, but members of the Duma are now refusing to ratify the all-important
START II agreement, which reduces both sides' nuclear arsenals by roughly
two-thirds. And though Russian leaders, given the conditions of their
army and economy, were scarcely in a position to block the entry of the
east European countries, President Clinton, for reasons known only to
him, felt bound to grant them extraordinary concessions in the Founding
Act. Not only did he vow not to station foreign troops or nuclear weapons
on the soil of the newly admitted countries, Clinton invited the Russians
to share in making alliance decisions as a member of a new "Permanent
Joint Council"-an astounding step that led Kissinger to remark acidly
that "Russia seems to be achieving NATO participation before the new applicants."

Whatever the impact of these concessions on American security, they point
to a much larger question: what will the significance be for us, as Americans?
The United States has come to a critical crossing point, and before the
country can move ahead its leaders and its citizens must reach agreement
about the part their nation will now play in the world. Twice before during
this century Americans have stood on such a precipice. Out of debates
cluttered with ideological baggage emerged two very different views of
the country's mission. What stayed close in outline, however, was the
rhetoric, the jargon of American exceptionalism that can be traced back
deep in the country's history. This fall, as the Senate debates the amended
treaty and as American taxpayers learn how much they will be expected
to pay to modernize the Polish and Hungarian and Czech militaries, this
rhetoric will once again echo loudly through the land. Must not Americans
be, as Secretary Albright said, "the authors of their age"?

Imbued as we are with such romantic notions it has become very difficult
to recognize that the answer to Albright's question is plainly "no." Americans
need not be the authors of their age. As in 1919, as in 1945, Americans
have a choice to make, one that must be based on an informed discussion
of interests and resources, not on a flurry of rhetoric. In a democracy,
words should serve as instruments that the people apply to explain and
promote interests, not empty slogans that saddle and imprison those that
use them. In the words we see flowing already from the Clinton administration,
we can make out the shape of the rhetoric to come, and it seems all too
strangely familiar. Once again, we will be told that Americans, because
they are Americans, must step boldly forward and bear the burden of leadership,
for if they do not, who will? Is not America, after all, "the indispensable
nation"?

III

Although it is hard to know when America first became "indispensable,"
the notion clearly emerges from what historians call American exceptionalism:
the idea of America as separate, godly, pure; a nation fundamentally unlike
all others-America as, in the Puritan John Winthrop's famous phrase, "the
City on a Hill." This idea animates much of the best-known literature
of early American diplomacy, from President Washington's admonition, in
his Farewell Address, to avoid "entangling alliances" to John Quincy Adams's
prescription that America should "go not abroad seeking monsters to destroy."

Throughout the nineteenth century, as the United States followed a vigorous
program that would expand its continental territory by diplomacy, purchase,
and war, the rhetoric of its foreign policy embodied independence, purity,
and, with respect to the power politics of Old Europe, a proudly ignorant
disgust. If already in 1796, George Washington could observe that the
European countries had "a set of primary interests which to us have none
or a very remote relation," Woodrow Wilson, exactly 12 decades later,
could say bluntly that with the causes and issues of the First World War
Americans "are not concerned. The obscure foundations from which its stupendous
flood has burst forth we are not interested to search for or explore."

We see here the flowering of a sweet-smelling but noxious illusion: America
as an island secure and strong behind its two broad oceans, its inexhaustible
resources rendering it wealthy and virtuous, threatened only by the predations
and corruptions of the Old World. However beautiful this myth, like most
myths it has not served as a reliable guide to self-understanding-or to
the clear action that can only follow from such understanding. In their
drive to conquer their continent, Americans behaved much as other vigorous,
young peoples have; their treatment of inconvenient obstacles-be they
native peoples and Mexicans, or the competing demands of rival countries-was
neither appreciably better nor worse than that of many others. As for
the unscrupulous and looming Old World nations, it was not the broad deep
ocean or Americans' inherent virtue that protected them but the benevolent
power of Great Britain and its Royal Navy.

America entered what was to be its century-the bloodiest century in the
history of mankind-in a kind of waking dream. To ward off the realpolitiker
schemings of European diplomats, it had become accustomed to presenting
scraps of paper: if America was secure and isolated in its hemisphere,
for example, this was owed to President Monroe's promulgation of his famous
"doctrine" in 1823, warning that American lands, north and south, "are
henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by
any European powers." And that was that; no navy or army needed: forceful
words equal power. The delusion became early on an American habit.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Great Britain quietly supplied the
shield behind which America prospered: Britain's all-powerful navy patrolled
the seas, protecting transatlantic trade routes, and British diplomats
labored, by shaping alliances that would prevent the emergence of any
one hegemonic state, to maintain a balance of power on the European continent.
Both of these traditional British policies were in fact crucial to the
United States: not only in its need for secure trade routes but because
it, no less than Great Britain, would inevitably be threatened by the
emergence of an expansionist power dominating the continent. Americans,
accustomed to viewing European diplomatic machinations with condescension,
generally ignored this dependence. Only many years later, and after the
shedding of much blood, would the point be driven home.

When in 1914 Gavrilo Princip set off Europe's second Thirty Years' War,
in which tens of millions people would eventually perish, it was inevitable
that Americans would look on with mesmerized horror and revulsion, as
if at a kind of barbaric spectacle that could not possibly concern them.
The implications that seem so obvious now-that an aggressive Imperial
Germany might succeed in ruling the continent and dominating the seas-did
not seem at all apparent then.

It is one of the great ironies of American history that at the very moment
this country's inescapable involvement in European affairs was about to
become crystal clear it had at its head an idealistic man singularly unequipped
to recognize this fact, or to explain it to his people. Woodrow Wilson
aimed instead to reconstruct the world, to render it, as would become
his great rallying cry, "safe for democracy." For this task purity and
distance must be maintained; the hands of the United States must not be
tainted, for how then could it serve as impartial creator of the new world
order?

So, as the conflict wore on, and the states of Europe cast generation
after generation of their young men into the bloody pit, President Wilson
wasted any diplomatic influence the United States might have had by nattering
on about "freedom of the seas," as if such a right were God-given and
did not depend ultimately on military power and political influence. Only
in April 1917, thanks to Germany's attacks on U.S. ships and revelations
about its diplomatic connivings with Mexico, were Americans finally persuaded
to enter the war, and by then it was very late: not only had the main
antagonists become so embittered that any reasonable settlement approximating
Wilson's "peace without victory" would be near impossible, but the Czar
had been forced to abdicate and the Cold War had in effect begun. With
moralistic flags flying, Wilson led his country into battle, and then,
after the armistice, on to the Paris Peace Conference, sweeping into Europe
on an avalanche of apocalyptic rhetoric. "We are seeking," declared the
president, "permanent not temporary foundations for the peace of the world."

Wilson's encounter with the Old World is one of the great set pieces of
modern history. "While we were dealing in momentous questions of land
and sea," David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, later recounted,
"he was soaring in clouds of serene rhetoric." The victorious European
nations had bled and died, had lost blood and treasure to an extent unknown
in history; they wanted territory and they wanted revenge. Wilson meantime
played the Jamesian ingenue, innocent and beguiling, taken in by thecalculating
predators of corrupted Europe. While the lands of the former Austro-Hungarian
and Ottoman empires were parceled out, the American fulminated and protested
but in the end showed himself to be, as John Maynard Keynes observed,
singularly "incompetent [in] the agilities of the council chamber." In
the end, Wilson's inspirational talk of "national self-determination"
would yield the independence of much of eastern Europe-an achievement
for which he is still worshipped there-and the grandiose and idealistic
League of Nations that his countrymen would in the end decline to join,
thus dooming it to irrelevancy.

Moral Beauty and Foreign Policy Failure

Embodying in their purest form aspirations that resonate loudly through
American history, Wilson's project was one of great moral beauty; but
as foreign policy it was an abject failure. Whatever practical influence
the United States might have had in inventing a new and durable world
order-andits military and economic strength might have ensured it great
influence indeed-was dissipated in an impractical program maladroitly
managed. And of this failure, unfolding relentlessly like the pitiless
mechanisms of a Greek tragedy, would be born the much greater carnage
of theSecond World War.

The unique circumstances of the Great War's end-the tumultuous revolution
in Russia; the spiritual desolation of the Western democracies; the deep
humiliation of a reeling and unstable Germany; and the creation of a group
of weak and unprotected countries huddled between Germany and the Soviet
Union-led by the mid-1930s to Kissinger's classic "security vacuum" in
eastern Europe.

"My mindset is Munich," Madeleine Albright famously proclaimed, "most
of my generation's is Vietnam. I saw what happened when a dictator was
allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the
tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.
For me, America is really, truly the indispensable nation." Speaking in
her native Prague, Albright drew the conclusion that has by now become
synonymous with the word Munich: that to appease a dictator is to bring
on war, that provocation must be met with strength.

Yet it was an odd argument to be making-particularly in Prague, and particularly
by a professional academic who had fled not only the Nazis but the Communists.
For whatever the celebrated cupidity of the Western powers at Munich,
by 1938 the fate of eastern Europe had largely been determined: as George
Kennan pointed out, the military and spiritual weakness of the West, and
the overwhelming strength of the rising totalitarian powers, meant that
the democracies would almost certainly be unable to defeat Hitler's Germany
and Stalin's Soviet Union if the dictators joined together. The West would
eventually be forced to ally itself with one totalitarian power against
the other. Apart from the moral catastrophe such a compact represented,
one need only glance at a map to see how it effectively doomed "Wilson's
children" to certain subjugation under either a German or a Soviet imperium.

Only one thing could save the independence of the eastern countries: an
early and vigorous entry of America into the war. But the United States,
having midwifed the creation of the new countries of the east, had withdrawn
its military power and political influence from Europe as abruptly as
it had brought them to bear, leaving the way clear for Munich. Now, as
the German divisions swept over the continent, America once again proved
standoffish, its people reluctant and unpersuaded; Roosevelt, though a
much more practical man than Wilson, could judge well the country's mood.
When America finally returned to Europe, thanks to the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and Hitler's precipitous declaration
of war, it did so as an ally of the Soviet Union.

In Europe, America's sole obsession was to crush the Axis; its British
allies, whose memories were longer and who understood that the war was
not only about Germany but about the Soviet Union and the political shape
of the postwar continent, were repeatedly frustrated in their efforts
to persuade the Americans to open an early second front, either by attacking
through the Balkans, or from Italy, or more directly and rapidly toward
Berlin itself-anything that might overtake the Red Army's steady march
to envelope eastern Europe. To the British pleas that the Western allies
must move rapidly to take Prague or Vienna or Berlin before the Soviets
did, "the Americans," in the words of historian Martin Walker, "point-blank
refused, insisting that they would not take casualties for political reasons."

There is something striking in this blank pigheadedness; for what was
the war about if not politics? For the Americans, it had become a moral
crusade, the defeat of Nazism as the ultimate evil; as for the Soviets,
they had been transformed, overnight, from anticapitalist villains to
heroic allies, reasonable men who could be dealt with reasonably after
the war. If the triumphant Red Army managed to occupy eastern Europe then
surely moral principles inscribed on scraps of paper would persuade them
to leave, or at least to behave like good democrats while they were there.

In the event, of course, the Soviets had their own ideas. As the First
World War had led inexorably to the Second, so now the Second would lead
to a different kind of conflict, one that would endure half a century
and impose enormous expense on the combatants, and on the peoples of eastern
Europe, enormous suffering.

IV

By late 1945, American troops had begun to demobilize and return home.
With western Europe reeling from the effects of the war, the plot could
easily have reprised that of the post-First World War years. But the men
in charge of American policy were of a different cast; many had seen the
errors of 1919 at close hand and were determined not to repeat them. Instead,
with frank self-consciousness and startling abruptness, the United States
would declare itself a true world power over the span of a few weeks in
the spring of 1947.

Greece was under siege, its right-wing government near collapse from a
domestic Communist insurgency; Turkey was also bending under Soviet pressure.
In February 1947, the British ambassador, whose country's "sphere of influence"
traditionally encompassed the eastern Mediterranean, informed the State
Department that His Majesty's Government, itself teetering near bankruptcy,
had determined to withdraw its troops from both Greece and Turkey-and
to do so within six weeks. In Greece, this would clearly lead to an early
Communist takeover.

"Under the circumstances," as Dean Acheson, then undersecretary of state,
recalled, "there could be only one decision." But if the decision was
preordained the manner in which it was explained and justified was not.
While granting substantial aid to Greece and Turkey clearly had historic
implications-the United States for the first time would be taking on a
broad peacetime role in European politics-President Truman could have
couched the policy in the narrowest terms, as simply a move by the United
States to come to the aid of two friendly governments struggling to survive
amid the stresses of postwar turmoil. The decision need have created no
precedent.

In the event, he did quite the opposite. On March 12, 1947, scarcely three
weeks after the British ambassador's visit, President Truman went up to
Capitol Hill and delivered to both houses of Congress a grand speech setting
forth America's new role in the world:

At the present moment in world history nearly
every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.... One way
of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by
free institutions, representative government, free elections.... The second
way of life is based upon the will of the minority forcibly imposed upon
the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press
and radio, fixed elections.... I believe it must be the policy of the
United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation
by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

The need to respond to a limited crisis in the eastern
Mediterranean had produced a sweeping American commitment to help threatened
nations around the world. Amid the confluence of interests that produced
this momentous result, two stand out. First was the felt need to offer a
strong and unambiguous statement of policy in response to an increasingly
aggressive Soviet Union.

Almost exactly a year before, and only a few weeks after George Kennan had
sent his celebrated "Long Telegram" from Moscow-on which, along with the
same diplomat's later "X" article, the containment doctrine would be based-Winston
Churchill had traveled to Fulton, Missouri, and declared that "an iron curtain
had descended across the continent."

A few months after Churchill's speech, Truman had asked his special counsel,
Clark Clifford, to put together a comprehensive analysis of the country's
relationship with the Soviet Union. Clifford and his assistant, George Elsey,
prepared for the president a lengthy document, titled "American Relations
with the Soviet Union," in which they argued that Soviet leaders had set
themselves "on a course of aggrandizement designed to lead to eventual world
domination by the U.S.S.R." Among other things, they concluded, the United
States "should support and assist all democratic countries which are in
any way menaced and endangered by the U.S.S.R."

Amid the many phrases of the Clifford and Elsey report that would find their
echo in the Truman Doctrine six months later, this is the most important,
for it forms the kernel of what would become the most frequently quoted
passage of the entire speech-what Clifford referred to as the credo:
"I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples
who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside
pressures." The rewriting is revealing: "democratic countries" becomes the
more evocative "free peoples;" "menaced and endangered" is recast as the
more heroic "resisting armed subjugation;" and the blunt "U.S.S.R." is broadened
out to "armed minorities or outside pressures."

The report's hardnosed insistence that the United States must act aggressively
abroad to strengthen its own security has been transformed into something
quite different: a call to promote the nation's fundamental principles around
the world. The frank pursuit of national interest has become the export
of American morality, to make "the world safe for democracy."

The old reliable Wilsonian idealism had returned: refurbished, reanimated,
but recognizably the same. When Secretary of State Marshall complained that
the speech had "too much rhetoric," White House officials responded that
this was needed to gain approval in the Senate. Two weeks before, the president
had invited the leaders of Congress to the White House to discuss the situation,
and Acheson took the floor to draw a lurid picture in which the fall of
Greece would lead directly to the Soviet "penetration" of three continents.
The congressmen, deeply impressed, urged the president to make this case
publicly, for only thus would he have a hope of securing the necessary funds.
Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee,
implored the president to "scare hell out of the American people."

But Truman's speech achieved its object not simply by means of scare tactics
but by arguing for America's moral mission in the world. Underlying the
words was the idea of an America free, democratic, and exemplary, a nation
exercising, as Wilson had put it, "the infinite privilege of fulfilling
her destiny and saving the world." What is fascinating about this annunciation
of America's apotheosis as a world power is the seamless grafting of this
familiar ideological messianism onto the felt necessities of national security
(a combination that Wilson's idealistic League of Nations proposal conspicuously
lacked). The budding national security establishment's insistence that the
country launch a worldwide struggle against the Soviets was deftly couched
in a positive call for the safeguarding and advancement of freedom. And
those who crafted the moral terms in which the doctrine was set clearly
understood them to be a crucial political tool in convincing the American
peopleto set sail on a course that was, after all, unprecedented.

The Faustian Bargain

And yet, in bidding for political support by casting America's risk and
responsibility in the broadest possible terms, Truman had forfeited the
chance to define, as clearly and as narrowly as possible, the country's
bedrock interests. In making the threat "clearer than truth," as Acheson
later put it, he and his colleagues had handed the country, and the policymakers
who would succeed them, a statement that suggested America's commitments
lay everywhere and at all times.

Walter Lippmann, who during the war had famously defined proper statecraft
as the "bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve,
the nation's commitments with the nation's power," criticized in Truman's
speech the "vague global policy that sounds like the tocsin of an ideological
crusade [that] has no limits. It cannot be controlled. Its effects cannot
be predicted."

In sounding this "tocsin of an ideological crusade," Truman had signed a
Faustian bargain: he won overwhelming public support for placing the country
in a role unanticipated in its history-that of a permanent player in the
politics of Europe and much of the rest of the world-and in return he had
put his country on record as the sovereign protector of all the world's
"threatened peoples." Indeed, it is hard to imagine a doctrine that might
do less to "bring into balance the nation's commitments with the nation's
power." Far from serving as a realistic statement of the country's responsibilities,
the Truman Doctrine constitutes, in the writer Theodore Draper's words,
"the original codification of the Pax Americana illusion;" in many of their
most important postwar foreign policy decisions-from Korea and Vietnam all
the way up to the Marine mission in Lebanon in 1982-American statesmen tended
to "substitute" the doctrine "for any rational calculus of means and ends."

Providing such a rational calculus, of course, is meant to be the obligation
of statesmen, and that they failed to do so cannot be blamed solely on Truman's
speech. In later hearings, both Acheson and Vandenberg stressed that in
future crises the United States would "of course"-in Acheson's words-act
"according to the circumstances of each specific case." Both made it clear
that they saw America's policy as "limited containment," not some universal
crusade.

But as soon became clear, this worthy intention concealed a paradox: to
follow such a prudent course would require not only that the country's statesmen
display seasoned judgment but that its politicians show themselves willing
and able to lead and to shape public opinion, rather than flee before it.
And, in the event, the same political reality that led the Truman administration
to cast its doctrine in the broad terms it did too often led subsequent
policymakers either to make imprudent decisions themselves, or to succumb
to their fear of politicians who made powerful demagogic use of the grandiose
role that Truman had set out for the United States.

Thus, the Truman Doctrine firmly anchored America's worldwide role in the
realm of domestic politics; subsequent events, especially the traumatic
"loss" of China, would show the deforming effect those politics could have
on American foreign policy. Acheson himself, in attempting to develop as
secretary of state a practical policy toward Communist China-in effect,
an engagement with Mao-found himself repeatedly stymied by the domestic
political implications of the Truman Doctrine; if he had thought the United
States would be free to act "according to the circumstances of each specific
case," he now discovered that he had helped shape a domestic political reality
that did not provide for such diplomatic freedom. How could the administration
pledge to fight Communists around the world one day and treat with them
the next?

These implications would become painfully apparent in the early years of
Vietnam, during which many prominent opponents of Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson (notably Richard Nixon) brandished the "domino theory" to exclude
the possibility of any retreat in Southeast Asia. Had Kennedy or Johnson
backed down and South Vietnam fallen to the North, the Democrats could have
expected to be blamed for opening the entire Pacific to communist penetration.
This widely acknowledged political reality dominated decisionmaking during
the early years of what would be a disastrous policy. On a recently released
recording of a 1964 telephone conversation with Georgia's Sen. Richard Russell,
President Johnson can be heard wearily conceding that the thought of sending
large numbers of young American boys to Vietnam "just sends chills up my
spine" but that the constraints of domestic politics left him no choice
in the matter: "They'd impeach a president, though, that would run out,
wouldn't they?"

V

As Johnson had feared, Vietnam proved to be disastrous, the great crevasse
cutting across the Cold War; into it disappeared not only his presidency
and that of his successor but much of the motivating power of the old Cold
War rhetoric. Newly assertive congressmen blocked the Ford administration's
efforts to come to the aid of the collapsing South Vietnamese regime in
1975, and even managed to prevent Secretary of State Kissinger from intervening
covertly against the Cubans and Soviets in Angola. Bitter military officers,
who believed the United States would have prevailed in Vietnam had it not
been for a lack of national commitment, offered a more subtle inhibition;
it would be a decade, and a painful struggle over American intervention
in Central America, before this sentiment was publicly codified in the Weinberger
Doctrine, where-in Reagan's secretary of defense offered, for any proposed
U.S. intervention abroad, a test of six points-among them, that the country
enter into no hostilities unless "vital interests were at stake," unless
it had a "reasonable assurance of the support of the American people and
their representatives," and unless it could do so "wholeheartedly and with
a clear intention of winning." To this would be appended the "Powell Corollary,"
which added to Weinberger's the strictures that intervention could only
be undertaken with "overwhelming military force" and a clear "exit strategy."
The Weinberger Doctrine, and its corollary-which, among other things, helped
block any vigorous American action in Bosnia-were the natural children of
the Vietnam Syndrome.
Ambitions and Weakness

For all their differences, both innovations in post-Vietnam American foreign
policy-Jimmy Carter's human rights crusade and the Reagan Doctrine-were
notable not only for their rhetorical dependence on the messianic strain
but for the striking contrast between their grand ambitions and the weakness
of the steps undertaken to achieve them. Carter did manage surprising successes,
particularly in Latin America, with a campaign of rhetorical and economic
pressure; but his human rights rhetoric also contributed to the administration's
paralysis in the face of attacks on traditional American allies in Iran
and Nicaragua. And President Reagan, for all his bluster about "rolling
back Communism," actually dared to employ American troops only in minor
skirmishes in Grenada and Libya, and in the short-lived fiasco in Lebanon.

It fell to that least imaginative of presidents, George Bush, to proclaim
the riseof the new world order. He did so not in Europe but on the sands
of the Persian Gulf-beneath which, he declared, he had buried "the specter
of Vietnam...forever." His assertion was contradicted not only by America's
hurried exit from Iraq-leaving Saddam Hussein in power-but by the administration's
prewar scrambling to build domestic support for launching the attack.

After rehearsing a variety of rationales-from the threat of Saddam armed
with nuclear weapons to the prospect of Iraq in control of world oil supplies
to Secretary of State James Baker's homely assertion that the confrontation
was about "jobs, jobs, jobs"-President Bush settled on a familiar but ever
more shopworn argument: the United States had a duty to lead the crusade
of freedom against tyranny. The president repeatedly portrayed "the dictator,
Saddam Hussein" (with whom the administration had had an extensive trading
and security relationship) as "worse than Hitler" and "Hitler revisited."
Still, only very late in the day did the Senate finally sanction the attack,
and then by a single vote; as for the people, they remained largely unconvinced-until,
that is, the television pictures began to come in.

Television-and the new drama of the so-called CNN effect-by the late 1980s
had begun to assert an odd pressure on U.S. foreign policy, contradicting,
with the unblinking power of its images, America's waning assertions of
moral hegemony. It is no accident that George Bush decided to intervene
in Somalia, from which images of starving children began to flood American
television screens only weeks after the pictures of emaciated men staring
from behind barbed wire were aired from Bosnia's Omarska concentration camp.
If Bush was unwilling to lay hold of the Yugoslav "tar baby," he would protect
his moral mantle in a safer, simpler place. And he would do so with no public
discussion, no debate in Congress; George Bush, powerless and gray-faced
as he prepared to leave the White House, simply appeared on Americans' television
screens one fine day and announced that "sometimes America must act."

Bush left it to his hapless successor to discover that the situation was
rather more complicated than that, that the hungry Somalis whom telegenic
American soldiers got so much credit for feeding actually owed their hunger
to a civil war. Even before the American Rangers plunged into a firefight
that left 18 of them dead, no one had managed to explain how American troops
would be able to leave Somalia a better place than they had found it unless
they pacified the country: had they stormed the beach simply to deliver
a few hot meals? And the failure to build political support for the intervention
meant that a single horrible television picture of a dead American airman
being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu was enough to destroy the
entire mission. Clinton, finding himself attacked from all sides, hastened
to withdraw. America's crusade to save starving Somalia, created by television
images, would be destroyed by television images only a few months later.

VI

Images of those corpses that surrounded me in the blood-soaked Sarajevo
marketplace quickly took shape on American television screens as well-although
the glittering NATO fighter aircraft, tracing their lazy arabesques in the
sky overhead, were nowhere to be seen. The meaning of the silver planes,
after all, was more ambiguous. The alliance had spent years doing little
more than watching and patrolling, standing meekly aside as U.N. peacekeepers
were ridiculed and humiliated. Looking back, the history seems to have followed
a bitter and logical progression, as if all the while the diplomats had
been steadily fading from view, losing substance so slowly that only now
do we realize that they had always been little more than ghosts, with but
power enough to hover over the battlefield and affix their seals, in law,
on what the generals had accomplished in blood. Only after almost four years
of the most savage "ethnic cleansing" did Western leaders give their pilots
leave to fire: if American power proved necessary to achieve a truce, so
too did the carnage that led up to it.

Bill Clinton, like George Bush, fearing he might be trapped in a "quagmire,"
took no action until the combatants had shed enough blood and conquered
enough territory to make the shaky Dayton Agreement possible. Fearing that
pictures of the 18 American servicemen killed in Somalia would damage him
politically, Clinton shut down the mission and brought the troops home.
Fearing pictures of Americans killed in Haiti might do the same, Clinton
approved an occupation that focused almost obsessively on safeguarding the
lives of American troops. And when the time came to send troops to monitor
the cease-fire in Bosnia, Clinton made sure the Americans stayed mostly
within their barracks while the war criminals who, under Dayton, were to
be arrested and judged, moved freely about.

Today, the great majority of them, including the most notorious and influential,
remain at large, and as they flout the agreement they undermine its chances
for success, making it daily less likely that American troops will be able
to leave Bosnia next summer without consigning the country to war again.
For President Clinton to order U.S. troops to move vigorously to enforce
the accord, he would need to be willing to build political support at home,
or at least to try to do so. This he has so far been unwilling to do. The
political ironies here are many, for the debate on maintaining American
troops in Bosnia that may come about owing to the administration's own cowardice
may well coincide and become entangled with the debate over NATO expansion;
and, given that two of the major tasks of the expanded alliance are meant
to be "crisis management" and "peacekeeping," the timidity of the Clinton
administration and its allies in Bosnia will not bode well for the future-and
may even dim the treaty's chances for ratification.

Throughout the post-Cold War years, American leaders have shown themselves
fearful of political retribution from a suspicious public. They proved unwilling
even to try to make a vigorous case to Americans that their country's interests
were involved abroad: not in Haiti, not in Somalia, not even in the former
Yugoslavia (a country which after all borders Italy, a member of the Western
alliance). They appeared quite at a loss to argue why the United States
might have an interest in preventing or stopping a brutal war in Europe
itself. At one time they might have relied on the ideological consensus
embodied in the Truman Doctrine, on its seamless blending of national security
and moral mission; but the political struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s
had left that consensus in shreds.

How then will the country's leaders ask Americans to give their solemn commitment
to defend Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic? And what can such a
commitment possibly mean? Up to now, Clinton officials have said little
about it. A true public debate might have suggested why this policy is so
deeply misguided: that despite the appeals of the east Europeans, despite
the dire warnings of an imminent "security vacuum" between Germany and Russia,
the decision to expand NATO points our country, and Europe-west and east-toward
the past and not toward the future. A half century ago, NATO's first secretary
general, Lord Ismay, famously characterized the alliance's purpose as "keeping
the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." Current American
leaders, as they supposedly set out to construct a "new security structure
for the West," seem to echo hauntingly all of these purposes.

First is the matter of keeping "the Russians out"-a goal Yeltsin characterized
as "squeezing Russia out of Europe." Such inflammatory words, obviously,
were meant both for Western ears and for those of angry representatives
in the Duma. But that the Russians have "come around" and accepted expansion
means little; for the question is not Russia's current weakness but the
long-run effect of the policy. George Kennan, for one, declares that it
"may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic
tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development
of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West
relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not
to our liking." The least that can be said is that the effect will be dynamic
and unpredictable, and the long-term influence on Russian politics is unlikely
to be good.

For Russia's current leaders, the political vulnerabilities it exposes are
obvious. "The West wants us to explain to our people that there is nothing
to fear," Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin told two Washington
Post reporters in Moscow. "How can we explain this? Nobody is going to listen
to any explanations. Developments in Russia could take an ominous turn."
Chernomyrdin was surprisingly frank about the "security implications," or
lack of them: "I'm not afraid that Poland or Hungary or anyone else will
be within NATO," he said. "It is not so dangerous for Russia.
The thing is I'm worried about Russia, what might happen in Russia, and
nothing else." Ultranationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, he said, "will
accuse the president and the government of doing nothing to prevent this
development...so we have to arm ourselves. The production facilities are
there in brand new condition, they are waiting. This is how the employment
problem will be resolved.... The tanks will be rolling out, and the planes.
Do we need this?"

A Larger Reality

Chernomyrdin's comments point up a larger reality: Russia now has politics-democratic
politics, demagogic politics, politics that go beyond the Politburo. In
finding himself forced to accept the West's policy, Boris Yeltsin will leave
himself open to the criticisms of powerful figures who already attack him
for his dependence on Western loans, for his weakness in facing Russia's
former adversaries, for his inability to maintain Russia's storied power.
The persistent refusal of Duma members to consider ratifying START II may
well mean Russia will retain more than 20,000 nuclear weapons, enough to
destroy the United States many times over. Who can argue that these weapons-palpable,
ominous, and all too present-are less threatening to the United States than
some "security vacuum" purportedly destined to open up between Germany and
Russia sometime in the distant future?

In an essay vigorously arguing that the alliance must expand eastward, Peter
Rodman, a noted "realist," suddenly bursts out: "Russia is a force of nature;
all this is inevitable." The frankness is refreshing. But while the NATO
decision is not inevitable, in moving east the Western alliance may well
set in train events and processes that are unstoppable. "If NATO
expands eastward," as one Yeltsin aide put it, "Russia under any government
will become a revisionist power striving to undermine the already fragile
European order."

Which is to say, this move by the West may turn out to help produce the
very "revanchist" Russia it professes to guard against. And, in that case,
the famous pledge embodied in chapter five of the NATO
Charter-that all alliance countries "treat an attack on any one of them
as attack on all of them"-will come into clear focus. The United States
will have formally taken on the defense of eastern Europe, a region that
lies thousands of miles from its shores and at the frontiers of Russia itself.
Are Americans willing to challenge a resurgent Russia, "force of nature"
that it is, in Poland, its historic back yard? Will they raise an army to
take on the task? Are they really willing to bring to bear their nuclear
weapons to shield the east? During the Cold War's closing years, after all,
the nuclear umbrella over Germany itself was growing ever more frayed; if
Americans are unwilling to sacrifice New York for Berlin, can anyone truly
believe they would do so for Warsaw or Budapest or Prague?

In their coming struggle to convince the U.S. Senate and the American people,
Clinton administration officials are unlikely to speak of the decision in
these terms. Instead, they will echo Vaclav Havel, the Czech president,
who declared that the alliance "is first and foremost an instrument of democracy
intended to defend mutually held and created political and spiritual values."
Although these phrases would have perplexed Lord Ismay, who believed he
was running a military alliance, they hold in them a kernel of truth, one
that expansion will surely nurture.

For it is difficult not to conclude, particularly when one takes a hard
look at the likelihood of Americans agreeing to fight Russians in (say)
Poland, that the alliance is in fact being transformed. President Clinton's
agreement to limit arms deployments in the eastern countries constitutes
precisely what U.S. military officers so feared, the dilution of NATO: the
security guarantee to the nations of eastern Europe will in fact mean less,
probably much less, than it does to those of the west. Not only will the
east Europeans have no alliance troops and no nuclear weapons on their soil
but when they proudly take their seats for the first time in the great hall
at Brussels, they will look across the historic table to see none other
than their old friends, the Russians. What the Russians' power will be here
is as yetuncertain, but clearly they believe it willbe great, and
they will push relentlesslyto make it greater. This is indeed "a re fined
definition of the purpose, missionand identity of NATO," as Havel demands,
but it is unlikely to be the one he had in mind.
Avoiding Reality

"The opportunity to make decisions about common defense," Havel writes,
"should not be denied a priori to countries that have embraced and advanced
Euro-American political cultural values. Some of the candidates for NATO
membership have undergone pain for the sake of these values." Havel's appeal
to values, his eagerness to remind the West what it owes his and the other
east European countries, his desperation about being closed out of the "Europe"
he so prizes: all of this is understandable.

That it is not for the first time-that east Europeans remember 1919 and
1945, that they brood over the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague
Spring of 1968 and all the other times they have called out to the West
and received no reply-that for them all this remains part of living history,
accounts for their desperate desire to be admitted into the alliance club.
They want to see themselves affirmed at last as part of Europe. Already
resentment over the West's refusal to admit them into its economic company
has helped undermine many of those politicians who led the original anticommunist
movements of the late 1980s, who waved as their standard the flag of Europe
and what it stands for. In many places in eastern Europe, a grim nationalism,
often championed by the Communist leaders of a few years back, now gains
power in those Westerners' place.

These, however, are not problems a military alliance can solve. They are
political, and the solution is to admit eastern Europe into the politics
and economy of Europe. To admit them to the European Union in a series of
clearly predetermined steps would bolster their economies and stabilize
their politics without threatening the Russians. This would be complicated
and expensive and, because of the migration of inexpensive east European
workers, politically controversial; but in the end these matters are details.
At the heart of the problem is the simple reality that the so-called project
of Europe never really included the countries to the east; that the Cold
War allowed the West to avoid confronting the larger and more difficult
question of Europe. Now that the Wall has been torn down, it is the United
States that is doing the same thing: helping Europe avoid reality. In so
doing, America is avoiding reality itself.

VII

For the United States, at bottom, the decision to expand the alliance represents
a failure of vision and a failure of strength; it is a policy of weakness
and passivity. It derives not only from a lack of imagination but from an
unwillingness to make and apply difficult decisions and a failure to attempt
what would be a truly creative approach to the problem of Europe and its
evolving relationship with the United States. When America's great senior
statesmen speak darkly of Germany seeking "to achieve its security by national
efforts," they are groping blindly with issues of the past, not seizing
hold of and shaping the future.

The Second World War is a half-century gone, but American policies cling
to it. U.S. troops protect the Europeans from the Germans, and the Germans
from themselves. U.S. policy should look to a future that has at its center
a more self-reliant Europe, a stronger "European pillar"-a Europe, that
is, where Europeans themselves take on more of the burden of their own defense,
and the defense of their former antagonists to the east. Institutions-the
Western European Union, the European Security and Defense Identity, among
others-already exist, though in pallid, embryonic form; what is needed to
give them life is the will to make a broad philosophical shift within the
alliance, and only the United States can initiate and sustain that.

The Europeans will never emerge from the shadow of the Americans until the
Americans feel less ambivalent about withdrawing their shadow. And the Americans
will never truly emerge from the Cold War until they come to a decision
to do so. Such a decision does not imply isolationism (a misleading word
that has never accurately described American attitudes); it impliesreality.

As I write, the train is racing down the tracks toward the Senate debate.
No one, it appears, can derail the expansion decision, though there has
not even been a reliable public estimate of its costs. As for the policy's
architects, they prefer to ignore the coming debate and behave as if the
future were somehow predetermined. ("NATO's expansion is vital," intones
Richard Holbrooke, in near Biblical cadences, "and will be done.") Such
mismanagement and fatalism may mean an ugly publicskirmish, in which
administration officials, having advanced their arguments for "a Europe
whole and free" and the United States as the "indispensable nation" toprovide
it, will find themselves fallingback on dark warnings that a decision
has been made, and that a move by American senators to reject it would be
"devastating" to the alliance. And so it might well be.It would be a
great irony if the Poles and the Hungarians and the Czechs, in theirdesire
to be sheltered within the warmembrace of the West, will have finishedby
weakening, perhaps fatally, the alliance itself.

In any event, the words of the senators are unlikely to be elevating. We
will hear about democracy, about credibility, and perhaps, dark intimations
about the Russians. Hard-line senators will denounce President Clinton for
his concessions, warning that by welcoming the Russians into the alliance's
halls, he has helped them achieve what they could not in half a century
of struggle: subverting the Western alliance.

A true debate, held at the proper time, might have brought to the public
the real weaknesses of expanding the alliance: that it promises to achieve
political and economic goals in eastern Europe that a military alliance
cannot deliver; that it may unsettle Russia in ways impossible to prophesy;
that it makes a pledge to defend the east European countries which, in a
real crisis, is unlikely to be kept; and that, in so confusing the real
purposes and pledges of NATO, it will lead eventually to the "hollowing
out" of the entire alliance.

But we have had no debate. America's leaders, persuaded that the country's
citizens are ignorant of and uninterested in the world, hope to escape what
might threaten to become a true debate-and, lurking behind it, the dire
possibility that, having raised the subject of NATOexpansion, Americans
might begin to question the reason, eight years after the Cold War's supposed
end, they are still being asked to pay for the alliance at all. What a final
irony it would be if a hasty lunge toward NATO 's expansion were to lead,
finally, to its dissolution.

That would be more than ironic, of course; it would be a tragic. America
has a strong interest in a prosperous and stable Europe, which will buy
American products and serve as a bulwark against disorder and instability.
America's leaders, either when addressing Bosnia or NATO, have been as unwilling
to make this case to the public as they are loath to debate the use of American
troops abroad. Because of this, when presidents have decided to send troops
they have found their freedom severely circumscribed, ensuring that if things
go badly for American forces, they and their president will find little
support at home-in turn encouraging administration officials to conclude
that Americans simply refuse to support an activist foreign policy. The
pitiable lack of debate over sending American troops to Somalia, and later
to Haiti, showed what happens when a president moves to intervene abroad
without any real discussion: the policies in both countries dangled from
a slender thread, vulnerable to the least reversal, to the smallest number
of American casualties.

That great matters of state are still handled in this fashion demonstrates
once again how darkly the Cold War still looms over American policy. The
National Security Act of 1947, which provided for the design of Cold War
military and security bureaucracies, still governs how our foreign policy
officials do business. Designed to oppose a powerful enemy in a perpetual,
low-level conflict, this statute emphasized centralized decisionmaking and
secrecy. A responsible Congress would rewrite it for a new world, one where
the threat is less immediate, secrecy is less important, and foreign affairs
can be conducted more democratically, as the

Founders intended. At the least, the United States needs
a recrafted version of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, not mainly to
limit the president's power but to ensure public debate-and, crucially,
the clear rationale for policy that should emerge from it-as well as to
force the president, Congress, and, most important, the people themselves,
to assume responsibility for the most important decisions the nation can
make.
Imagined Hegemony

As will become evident during the debate over NATO,
an ideological vacuum lies at the heart of American foreign policy. The
old Truman Doctrine consensus has passed; and despite sporadic attempts,
officials have managed to put nothing in its place. In the coming months
American officials will speak imploringly of "integrating new democracies"
in eastern Europe, of creating "a Europe whole and free" which can onlybe
accomplished by America, "the indis-pensable nation." For Americans
this sortof idealistic rhetoric-as Wilson sadly discovered-is not enough;
to succeed it must be grafted-as Truman showed-to a clear and demonstrable
threat to America's interests. Clinton officials have not managed to square
this circle, and for a very good reason: given their muddled thinking,
it cannot be done.

In marching east with NATO, Washington seeks to maintain for the country
an empty hegemony, one composed of remnant scraps of the Cold War world
and rooted, as one Bush official put it, in "semipermanent factors of
power and geography," with a nod to newly ascendent "rogue nations" that
America must be prepared to fight two at a time. It is not simply that
such an imagined world hegemony is expensive and wasteful, pointing toward
the past and not toward the future, but that it is unlikely, when it is
finally brought clearly before the eyes of the American people, to engage
their support.

To gain such support the country's leaders will need to explain the path
they have chosen; they will need to convince Americans-at a time when
their schools fail to educate their children; when their public pension
and medical systems lack for funds; when their political institutions
have lost the confidence of the people-why at such a time their country
must preserve and even enlarge its role in the world, and how it can do
so while bringing "into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in
reserve, the nation's commitments with the nation's power." If America's
leaders cannot make this case, the soldiers sitting in their tanks in
prosperous Germany will begin to appear, sooner rather than later, very
absurd indeed.

The president, a man celebrated for his skills in persuading, has shown
little interest in taking on such a task. For to do so would be to expend
precious "political capital" that, he presumably believes, could be more
profitably invested elsewhere. This is the definition of shortsightedness,
as President Clinton may well discover yet again during the coming debate
over NATO. Whatever the ultimate result of the "Faustian bargain" that
President Truman signed on toin making his famous speech half a century
ago, the difference in responsibility between him and the present occupant
of his office is striking.

Eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall America stands on the verge
of great opportunity-not only to shape a policy for a new world but to
tell its people frankly about that policy, and the reasons why it is right
for the country. But no one is talking. Thus far, it has seemed far easier
to call up the familiar smokescreen, to swoon over America as "the indispensable
nation." And yet the "post-Cold War world," however one defines it, is
only beginning. For Americans, ever able to recreate themselves, the question
is whether they will be able to do so now-whether they will be able to
walk through that sunlit portal offered them in 1989.

America possesses overwhelming power, and great prosperity. As we gaze
outward, our world may seem on the whole placid and bright. But we remain
marooned in the Cold War, encumbered with a policy that imposes upon the
world a mindless hegemony, a predominance for its own sake; and we can
only hope that we do not one day discover, with James, that despite the
bright and blinding sunshine, it was a different reality the treacherous
years were all the while really making for and meaning.